Those of us who attended Catholic schools first heard the subject broached in seventh or eighth grade and later in high school. “Some of you will have a calling we call a vocation,” revealed sister Louise Clara. “Something deep inside you that draws you to consider the priesthood as your course in life. There is nothing more pleasing to God than one of his flock going out into the world to save souls and bring them back to Him. Literally, a religious career is helping to save the world.”
‘Holy shit!’ I thought. 'I’m glad that’s not happening to me.’ I slowly eyed the room, looking for victims of this calling, even finding a few likelies such as the Blanchette twins whose mother volunteered them and herself for numerous sucker jobs at the convent. I felt better than ever that my long-planned baseball career had caused me to refrain from joining the choir boys, who later inevitably became altar boys, a sure early trap leading to one of those “vocations.” Saving the world seemed like an enormous bother and there were no guarantees you’d even make a dent what with all those Protestants, Jews and Hindus out there.
Throughout my early life, it seemed someone was always saving the world, but it never seemed to stay saved. Early on, the Americans saved the world from Hitler, then Jonas Salk saved the world from Polio, and after that Luke Skywalker saved the world in Star Wars. Even bacteria once saved the world, for crying out loud (See: War of the Worlds). Later, young Greta Thunberg, an avid climate advocate, took her swings at the plate to mixed reviews. This business of saving the world never seems to end. The latest candidate taking the plunge is perhaps the least likely of all and we don’t like his chances. Or hers, either.
Ziz LaSota To The Rescue
"Oh dear, what can the matter be? Johnny's so wrong at the fair!"
Once upon a time in the cold expanse of Alaska, a homeschooled child stared out at the aurora borealis and wondered if the world was real. Years later, that same child---taller than most men, cloaked in black, calling itself Ziz---would terrify Silicon Valley’s Rationalists, faking death, wielding a sumurai sword and leaving six bodies in its wake. Such is the tale of Ziz LaSota, the transgender AI doomsday cultist who believed humanity would perish under artificial intelligence…unless Ziz saved it first. We all have our doubts about the intentions of AI but LaSota wasn't taking any chances.
LaSota’s early life as a boy was unremarkable: eldest of three, his father a university instructor, homeschooled through lonely Alaskan winters. But teenage depression twisted his mind inward. Puberty felt like death. Ziz wrote of being “horrified at being overwritten by a new self.” Horrified or not, LaSota soon identified as a trans woman with a revised agenda.
Logic became the new religion. LessWrong and the Rationalist forums were the new sacred texts. Ziz decided AI was the harbinger of humanity’s doom and dropped out of the University of Alaska graduate school in 2016, arriving in California’s Bay Area ready to “save the world.” Alas, Silicon Valley is a cruel temple for prophets. Ziz was just another zealot in a city full of them. LaSota declared faith in the Sith, the dark side order in Star Wars. You gotta start somewhere, right?
Ziz called Rationalists “master Jedi.” The community tolerated the eccentricities since they, too, believed AI could destroy us all. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried all had passed through the Rationalist forge. But Ziz took it further with a blog listing categories of people to be “airlocked.” Oh-oh. LaSota advocated radical veganism, sleep deprivation rituals and violent moral tests, recruiting a cadre of mostly transgender and nonbinary tech aspirants from Google, Oracle and NASA. They called themselves the Zizians. To them, Ziz was the messiah the anti-artificial intelligence universe had been waiting for. So here’s the payoff:
2019—Zizians don Guy Fawkes masks and robes to disrupt a Rationalist event in California. No guns were found, but SWAT stormed the venue. Arrests followed. The Zizians chanting was described by police as “speaking in tongues.”
2020---In Vallejo California, landlord Curtis Lind was stabbed with knives and a samurai sword after demanding unpaid rent. He shot two Zizians in self-defense, one died. Ziz faked death by falling off a boat, the obituary running in Alaskan newspapers. (Y'gotta give the gal 'A' for effort.)
2023---The parents of Zizian Michelle Zajko were found dead in Pennsylvania. Bullets matched Zajko’s gun, but evidence fell short. Ziz was arrested with Michelle in a hotel but bailed out and quickly disappeared.
2025---Lind was stabbed to death before he could testify against the group. Days later in Vermont, two Zizians fired at Border Patrol agents. One agent and one Zizian were killed in the shootout.
Rationalism has always prided itself on logic untainted by emotion, but Ziz turned logic into madness. Rolo’s Basilisk, the infamous AI thought experiment predicting torture for those who don’t create AI, haunted LaSota, who believed that any attempt to stop AI would condemn her to eternal torture by future malevolent superintelligences. The solution: don’t back down, escalate and airlock the doubters. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Rationalist guru who warned Ziz of AI extinction, called LaSota’s descent “sad,” writing that one’s weirdness attracted even weirder people, some of whom turn out to be “genuinely crazy in a contagious way among the susceptible.” No shit.
Today, Ziz LaSota is no longer saving the world, but instead sits in a Maryland jail undergoing a court-ordered mental competency evaluation. She faced federal charges for possession of firearms and ammunition as a fugitive from justice and both state and federal charges tied to homicides across multiple states. Ziz is not accused of wielding the murder weapons, but prosecutors say LaSota orchestrated the violence. The Rationalist community is left with a bitter aftertaste. Was Ziz simply an unwell person who found justification for her madness in an AI apocalypse theory or did Rationalism’s own doomsday fetish birth a new Ziz? The Rationalist blogger Zvi Mowshowitz wondered if LaSota would have simply created another cult if AI philosophy hadn’t ensnared her. “I give it a 55% chance,” he guessed.
But who knows? And who cares? For Ziz LaSota and others of a similar bent---sometimes you just gotta Save The World.
Operation Cat Drop
In the late 1950s, a large area around Sarawak, Borneo was sprayed with DDT to control malaria. The DDT killed wasps that had previously left caterpillars in check, which led to an alarming caterpillar boom that quickly damaged homes throughout the area. The DDT also poisoned insects that the local cats ate, leading to the death of virtually all cats in the area. Without the cats to serve as traffic cops, the rodent population exploded.
This was obviously another job for England’s elite Royal Air Force, which had already saved the world---or at least London---from the German Luftwaffe in World War II. On March 17, 1960, if was raining cats, if not dogs, on Bario in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak. From a height of 400 feet, the RAF parachuted twenty-three felines into town. The cats were packed expertly into wicker baskets and all of them survived the flight, which landed smack in the middle of the war zone. Subsequent to the operation, Mr. John Seal, chief operations officer of the Sarawak Civil Aviation Department sent a congratulatory telegram to the RAF. “We are delighted with your magnificent job on the delivery,” it stated. “This army of cats from heaven has quickly put an end to the problem and saved our little world.”
The London Times suggested a new motto for the Royal Air Force; “Saving the World, One Cat at a Time.” After brief consideration, the advisory was wadded tightly and heaved.
The Real Heroes
Has anyone actually saved the world? Edward Jenner has a claim to it with his pioneering work on vaccination against smallpox in the late eighteenth century. The vax led to the eventual eradication of the disease, saving millions of lives. Norman Borlaug, an agricultural scientist, undoubtedly saved at least a billion people from starvation via his work in developing high-yielding, disease-resistant crops. Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber, developed the Haber-Bosch Process, which allows for the mass production of ammonia in fertilizer. ScienceHeroes.com says the process allowed production of enough food to save billions of people. Plaudits to all of them, but save the world? Probably not.
The closest people to planet savers are likely two Russians. In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Defence Forces, was on duty when a Soviet early-warning system indicated an American missile attack. Instead of following protocol and launching a retaliatory strike, he delayed any action, correctly suspecting a false alarm. Petrov’s good sense potentially averted a nuclear war. Then, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet submarine officer second in command, prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo during a tense standoff with the U.S. Navy. The captain of the sub and the third senior officer wanted to launch but the order required authorization from all three and Vasili refused.
You know that Doomsday Clock, the brainchild of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists…the one that CNN is always telling us is rushing headlong toward midnight? Right now it’s 85 seconds to midnight, almost the closest it’s ever been to catastrophe-time. Back in the days of Stanislav and Vasili, it was one second to extinction. Let’s give those Russian boys a hand…and maybe a dacha on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
That’s all, folks….
